Page 71 of Reckless Woman
She’s right. She deserves a better explanation than what I gave to her, but that means smashing the tin soldier and he’s still tightly wrapped in my fist.
Last night, when I’d finally stumbled back to our room more drunk than I’d ever been in my life, she was curled up on the far side of the bed pretending to sleep.
Pretending.
Fucking pretending.
And I don’t know how to make us real anymore.
There’s an aircraft approaching on the horizon. Her landing gear flashes silver in the afternoon sun and she’s spelling out trouble. Dante is just as irritated about what’s arriving here in the next few minutes as he is about the lack of Viviana’s dead body. Once he’d spat out his reasons for keeping me in the dark, he’d told me how she’d overcome Sofía in his office.
Since then, it’s like the sea snake has slithered back underground.
Every outhouse has been searched, there are cameras covering every square mile…if she got reckless and decided to swim for it, she should have been washed up on the beach by now.
And then there’sthis. Rick Sanders bending the rules in his favor as usual.
Shifting my weight against the jeep, I adjust my baseball cap as the aircraft taxis to where I’m standing at the edge of the turn pad.
“Sanders,” I say in greeting, as a familiar pair of black Oxfords hit the ground in front of me. He’s not rocking his usual slick self, though. He looks like he’s been sleeping in his midnight blue suit for a week.
“Grayson,” he drawls, his shrewd gray eyes flickering over my face. “I hear you’re an honest man now.”
Only with my wife. And look where that got me.
“I doubt that applies to any of us,” I tell him. Removing my sunglasses, I can’t resist adding, “Still sore you lost the race?”
Oh, how you’d fucking laugh if you knew I was losing it, too.
“You won the sprint, but I’m acing the marathon, asshole,” he bites back sharply. “The rewards are so much sweeter.” He reaches for the hand of the woman standing behind him and tugs her into view. “Nina, meet Joseph. He’s not much of a conversationalist, but he gets the job done.”
I grit my teeth, sweeping a practiced gaze over the woman, taking in her bruised eyes and her soft brown curls. She’s wearing a crumpled black silk dress with a cum stain on the hem.Fucking Sanders. Thinking with his cock, as usual.
She’s the same woman I saw behind his bar in Manhattan, which prompts me to repeat the same accusation: “She looks Russian. You sure you’ve done your homework.”
She blushes.
Rick scowls.
“Romanian,” he snaps. “And a simple ‘hello’ wouldn’t go amiss, or don’t they teach you manners back in Texas?”
Not as much as they teach you how to run when your crazy Pa is pointing a loaded shotgun at you.
“You crossed a line, Sanders,” I warn, reaching back into the car for the bug detector. “You know his rules.”
This woman is an outsider, and after everything that’s gone down in the past few days Dante isn’t in the most benevolent of moods. She’s in for a rough ride. He doesn’t want her here and he’ll be going out of his way to make that sentiment clear.
“And how is King Midas?” Rick motions for the woman to lift her arms to be scanned. “Is he busy counting out his billions, or have we been granted an audience?”
“He’s down at the base. He’ll be back shortly. Step forward for me, Miss Costin. This won’t take long.”
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” he encourages.
She does as we ask, flinching like an unbroken filly as I sweep the device over her body and black bag. She reeks of sex and some smokey perfume, and for a dizzying moment I want Anna so badly the tin soldier nearly slips from my fingers.
Rick clucks impatiently at me. “A bit ‘overkill’, isn’t it?”
Ignoring him, I open the Jeep’s door. “Okay, you’re clean,” I tell her as she slips inside the vehicle. “Not that fucking clean, though,” I murmur to Rick as he goes to follow her. “I can smell you all over her, Brooklyn Boy. Not the smartest move screwing some broad on his jet.”